Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Many struggle to retain facts they learn Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto

If you're going to learn anything, you need two kinds of prior knowledge:

knowledge about the subject at hand, like math, history, or programming

knowledge about how learning actually works

The bad news: Our education system kinda skips one of
them, which is terrifying, given that your ability to learn is such a
huge predictor of success in life, from achieving in academics to
getting ahead at work. It all requires mastering skill after skill.“Parents and educators are pretty good at imparting the
first kind of knowledge,” shares psych writer Annie Murphy Paul. “We're
comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers,
facts. But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself - the
'meta-cognitive' aspects of learning - is more hit-or-miss, and it
shows.”To wit, new education research shows that low-achieving
students have “substantial deficits” in their understanding of the
cognitive strategies that allow people to learn well. This, Paul says,
suggests that part of the reason students perform poorly is that they
don't know a lot about how learning actually works.It's a culture-wide issue.Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis and coauthors of Make It Stick: The Science Of Successful Learning, say that “how we teach and study is largely a mix of theory, lore, and intuition.”So let's cut through that lore. Here are learning strategies that really work.Force yourself to recall The least-fun part of effective learning is that it's hard.
In fact, the “Make It Stick” authors contend that when learning if
difficult, you're doing your best learning, in the same way that lifting
a weight at the limit of your capacity makes you strongest.It's simple, though not easy, to take advantage of this:
force yourself to recall a fact. Flashcards are a great ally in this,
since they force you to supply answers.Don't fall for fluencyWhen you're reading something and it feels easy, what you're experiencing is fluency.It'll only get you in trouble.

Example: Say, for instance, you're at the airport and you're trying to
remember which gate your flight to Chicago is waiting for you at. You
look at the terminal monitors — it's B44. You think to yourself, oh,
B44, that's easy. Then you walk away, idly check your phone, and
instantly forget where you're going. Read more...

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About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.